Sharon was a teacher in Belfast. She started to wonder why some of her young students were not performing well. Then she looked into their backgrounds. Each one had a father or mother who had been killed in the Troubles. Each parent's murder was the result of British collusion. "We know who pulled the trigger,"Sharon tells her audience in Glastonbury. "We want to know who pulled the strings."

From December 2-15, 2004, "An Fhirinne" representatives Sharon Pickering [County Derry] and Bernice Swift [County Fermanagh] toured the US. An Fhirinne (Irish for "The Truth") is an Irish organization composed of family members of victims of British collusion to murder. The Hartford and Springfield Units of Irish Northern Aid sponsored Sharon on December 10th.

Irish Northern Aid is sponsoring the U.S. Tour so that the latest news on the continuing struggle for the truth about these atrocities, innocent members of the public murdered by unionist death squads in collusion with British military/police intelligence, can be brought to the American public, media, and our political leaders.

Sharon Pickering is An Fhirinne's "Six Counties Organizer" and Bernice Swift is An Fhirinne's "County Fermanagh Project Organizer." The organization's stated mission is "to support Victims of State Sponsored Violence" and to "demand the Truth from the British Government on its policy of State Sponsored violence in Ireland."

In the mid-1980s, the British government adopted a policy which gave them virtual control of unionist death squads. These paramilitaries were re-organized, re-armed, resourced and directed by the British intelligence services to ensure that their targeting was "more professional."

Hundreds were killed, and many more injured and maimed, in a campaign of state terror.

The policy of employing loyalist death squads was endorsed at the highest political level. The British government has never accepted its responsibility for the deaths which resulted from its policy of collusion.

Instead they are expending enormous energy and resources in concealing the truth. At the very least, the British government must honor its commitment to a full, independent, international judicial inquiry into the killing of the human rights lawyer, Pat Finucane.

Then, the whole truth about British government directed collusion needs to be told. The structures, which operated the policy of state murder, need to be dismantled now.

Irish human rights lawyer Pat Finucane was murdered in 1989. One man has been identified in the plot. The British government is blocking a full public inquiry into official collusion.